Tuesday, 20 March 2012

Marebito / The Stranger from Afar (2004)

"I'd go so far as to imitate a psychopath to record the
terror of the victim on my retina and videotape."

- Masuoka, Marebito

From Takashi Shimuzu, director of The Grudge, comes this weird
little story about a numbed cameraman who is obsessed
with understanding and recording pure fear. Even as the story begins,
all is not well in Masuoka's world - living alone in an apartment
crowded by TV screens and recording equipment, taking (and then not
taking) Prozac and listlessly watching snuff in an attempt to catch a
glimpse of the weapons-grade terror he's searching for, it's implied
that we've entered the story at an unknown juncture of a colossal
downward slope.

Things take a turn when Masuoka records a disturbing suicide on
the Tokyo subway. Watching and re-watching the clip obsessively
causes it to change in Masuoka's eyes - for a second, the suicide
victim looks right into the lens, prompting a miniature headtrip in
which he percieves a shadowy other world under the city, populated by
skittering half-people. Venturing beneath the subway, he finds
yawning Lovecraftian vistas (Richard Sharpe Shaver and At the
Mountains of Madness are name-checked) and a beautiful, naked girl,
whom he rescues from the underworld and brings back to his apartment.

Marebito ultimately turns into a strange brew of vampire romance,
Chthonic fantasy and mind-of-a-madman narrative, all unfolding at a
cool, unemotional pace that mirrors the narration of the detached Masuoka. It's hard
to decide exactly what's happening on a first viewing, partly because
there are several competing strands of confusion: Masuoka frequently
states that he can only experience reality through a video camera
(leading us to wonder whether the frequent changes from handheld to
third-person viewpoint are significant), and characters who seem less
crazy than him hint at a hidden backstory, which might offer a more
rational explanation for what we're seeing.

I'm not sure Marebito even is a puzzle that can be deciphered by
analysing scenes to filter out what's real and what's Masuoka.While
the tone is completely different, it's an American Psycho-esque
meeting of internal and external experience, underpinned by an oddly
specific and obscure mythology (The
Shaver Mysteries, which I'd never heard of before this but might
hold a few more answers) and a monster-human love story that may or
may not be a fantasy.

The most rational reading is that we're sharing the delusions of a
psychotic as he ambles further and further from reality, but it could
just be interpreted as an open-ended piece of surrealism about a man
journeying deeper into his subconscious, complete with symbolic
killings and beautiful monsters. Definitely more of a chin-stroker
than a creeper-outer, Marebito's still got enough scary to watch it
as a straight-up horror, but it demands interpretation rather than
just viewing.